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chuckro“Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! And I’ll form the head!” - Keith, original series.
“I’m a leg!” - Hunk, new series.
America’s first real exposure to combining mecha anime has returned. No longer a bastardized recut several unrelated anime series, this is the cartoon we all imagined we were watching back in the 80s.
The executive producers are Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery (both most notably of the Avatar franchise). And it shows: It’s funny! The dialogue is goofy (especially when Hunk is involved), but deliberately so and therefore a lot of fun. The characters have backstories and distinct personalities; and episode plots consist of more than, “Oh look, a robeast. Let’s form Voltron and cut it in half.”
They blend together events and characters from both the original Japanese GoLion series and the US Voltron dub / recut; and there’s plenty of new material. They swap around some roles—“Sven” is renamed “Shiro” (after the Japanese version of the character) and becomes the older, leader character and pilot of the black lion, where Keith the hothead gets the red lion and Lance the jerk with a heart of gold gets the blue lion. Enemy names are a mix of some of the Japanese ones and the American ones.
Having diversity and keeping the original cast are a bit mutually exclusive, but to their credit, they do try. Hunk’s skintone is noticeably darker than in other adaptations. (Lance’s too, to a lesser extent.) Shiro has an artificial arm and PTSD; and is presumably of Asian descent. (In the original, they were either all Japanese or all white, depending on your opinion as a viewer.) It’s sort-of a spoiler, but they did increase the number of female members of the cast, and I was able to figure that out from foreshadowing before they officially revealed it.
Princess Allura may or may not end up piloting a lion at any point, but she’s got enough alien superpowers to make her awesome regardless. She’s the power source for the castle’s wormhole drive; she can recharge dying living planets; she can shapeshift to a limited degree; she’s apparently very strong; and she actually has tactical skills.
For a show about Voltron, the titular giant robot actually doesn’t show up all that much. They show that the lions are decent fighting forces all by themselves (and have distinctive armaments, rather than all being the same), and also that while Voltron is really powerful, it doesn’t come with a user’s manual. Presumably they’ll manage to unlock new and exciting powers for both the individual lions and Voltron as the series goes on.
SPOILER: It appears from the season finale that the evil Zarkon was the original pilot of the black lion, as he has that paladin’s weapon (and is very, very good with it) and the lion does seem to at least somewhat respond to him. The season ends on a cliffhanger, as the castle and the lions are separated by an unstable wormhole.
Overall: Much like the Thundercats reboot, this is an excellent distillation of the nostalgia value of the original while carefully removing a lot of the things that were kinda terrible about it. I’m totally in for season 2.
“I’m a leg!” - Hunk, new series.
America’s first real exposure to combining mecha anime has returned. No longer a bastardized recut several unrelated anime series, this is the cartoon we all imagined we were watching back in the 80s.
The executive producers are Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery (both most notably of the Avatar franchise). And it shows: It’s funny! The dialogue is goofy (especially when Hunk is involved), but deliberately so and therefore a lot of fun. The characters have backstories and distinct personalities; and episode plots consist of more than, “Oh look, a robeast. Let’s form Voltron and cut it in half.”
They blend together events and characters from both the original Japanese GoLion series and the US Voltron dub / recut; and there’s plenty of new material. They swap around some roles—“Sven” is renamed “Shiro” (after the Japanese version of the character) and becomes the older, leader character and pilot of the black lion, where Keith the hothead gets the red lion and Lance the jerk with a heart of gold gets the blue lion. Enemy names are a mix of some of the Japanese ones and the American ones.
Having diversity and keeping the original cast are a bit mutually exclusive, but to their credit, they do try. Hunk’s skintone is noticeably darker than in other adaptations. (Lance’s too, to a lesser extent.) Shiro has an artificial arm and PTSD; and is presumably of Asian descent. (In the original, they were either all Japanese or all white, depending on your opinion as a viewer.) It’s sort-of a spoiler, but they did increase the number of female members of the cast, and I was able to figure that out from foreshadowing before they officially revealed it.
Princess Allura may or may not end up piloting a lion at any point, but she’s got enough alien superpowers to make her awesome regardless. She’s the power source for the castle’s wormhole drive; she can recharge dying living planets; she can shapeshift to a limited degree; she’s apparently very strong; and she actually has tactical skills.
For a show about Voltron, the titular giant robot actually doesn’t show up all that much. They show that the lions are decent fighting forces all by themselves (and have distinctive armaments, rather than all being the same), and also that while Voltron is really powerful, it doesn’t come with a user’s manual. Presumably they’ll manage to unlock new and exciting powers for both the individual lions and Voltron as the series goes on.
SPOILER: It appears from the season finale that the evil Zarkon was the original pilot of the black lion, as he has that paladin’s weapon (and is very, very good with it) and the lion does seem to at least somewhat respond to him. The season ends on a cliffhanger, as the castle and the lions are separated by an unstable wormhole.
Overall: Much like the Thundercats reboot, this is an excellent distillation of the nostalgia value of the original while carefully removing a lot of the things that were kinda terrible about it. I’m totally in for season 2.
